The following is an excerpt from a story about Wichita State University professor Ravi Pendse's high-tech plans for the university. The story appeared in the Jan. 19 issue of The Wichita Eagle.

Billions of sensors power vision of interconnected world

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

A professor at Wichita State University plans to create a university center with an ambitious name: The Center for the Internet of Everything.

Step one: Plant a small garden on campus where plants will message irrigation pipes telling how much water they need.

Ravi Pendse, helped by Internet companies NetApp and Cisco, hopes to create other innovations he says could put WSU in the high-tech big leagues.

The garden will model how to save water and billions of dollars in the world’s crops and lawns.

In the second and subsequent steps, Pendse’s students and partners would develop innovations linking computers, smartphones, social media and the billions of sensors now being attached to — everything.

Pendse as a technologist has collaborated with NetApp and Cisco for years, creating technology and many WSU graduates who went to work for those companies.